An Imperfect Lens

by Anne Richardson Roiphe

  Papers were made available to the members of the Committee of Public Safety. Keeping his patients waiting, Dr. Malina sat in his office and read:

  In 1832, as Cholera spread across Europe, in Spain you could face the death penalty for leaving a town infected by Cholera. In Paris a rumor circulated that the rich had poisoned the wells and fountains to get rid of the poor. In the Philippines a group of biologists and naturalists were killed when their cases of reptiles and insects were found. The natives thought that they were sorcerers spreading the disease. In Prussia, beggars turned up at rich people’s houses saying that they had just left infected areas and that they would go away if paid. In St. Petersburg a rumor spread that the sick were being lured into hospitals to be quietly butchered. In July 1831 a mob in St. Petersburg attacked hospitals and rescued the patients. In Budapest a rumor spread that the rich had poisoned the wells. Some rich people were captured and tortured by mobs until they confessed that this was true. In Austria soldiers were posted on the border with orders to forbid entry to cholera victims. In 1823 in Persia, guns and muskets were fired in the streets to frighten the Cholera away.

  Dr. Malina said to his colleagues on the committee, “We have to think of the cholera as if it were a mad dog running through our streets. We are the dogcatchers. We must do our job.” Everyone at the table nodded. No one at the table knew what to do.

  LOUIS KNEW THAT they wouldn’t see the microbe instantly. How could they distinguish it from all the other living organisms that would squirm across their slides? But they could begin. Emile’s long face and sad eyes seemed less long and less sad. The basin was placed on the workbench between them. They put on gloves. They put more water up to boil. They dipped their lenses into the water. The hot plates with mercury on them warmed the air around the table.

  They were preparing slides dipped into the bowel fluid. They placed some fecal material in a syringe that Louis brought to Nocard to inject in a few rabbits. Perhaps the rabbits would fall sick with cholera, and then when they examined the rabbit blood they might see the microbe. There was a deep quiet in the laboratory. The two puppies had exhausted themselves in a chasing game around the edges of their cage. The only sound came from a windowsill on which a starling sat and croaked his song into the day. There was a hum of insects on the high fronds of the palms that lined the street.

  Marcus, coerced by Roux, made several trips into the main wards of the hospital. He brought a sack filled with clothes, a towel, a piece of sheet, a child’s rag doll, a baby blanket. Louis had seen nothing remarkable on his slide. Emile had noticed strands of unrecognizable matter in the bowels, but he wasn’t certain they were alive. The men took careful notes on what they saw. They drew pictures in their notebooks. They numbered their slides. Nocard injected four rabbits in the soft tissue under their right shoulders with the fluid found in the bowel that Marcus had retrieved. Would it sicken them? He wrote down the amount he had used, the color and number of the particular rabbit he had injected. He listed the colors and numbers of the rabbits he had not injected. He waited. The rabbits moved their whiskers up and down. One ate the bits of bread that Nocard had placed in a dish in their cage. Little pellets of rabbit waste were on the bottom of the cage. They looked normal. Nocard waited. In a box on one of the tables was his anesthetic, his cutting tools. He would examine the brains of the rabbits. He had anesthetized animals, cut open their skulls, and taken tissue from their brains before. He had trephined sheep, pigs, and dogs more than two dozen times in Pasteur’s laboratory. It was never pleasant. It gave him nightmares. He had become a veterinarian to ease animals’ pain, not to cause them suffering. But he had good hands, a clear eye when he had his glasses on, and he did not believe that animals had souls. He wasn’t certain people did, either, but he was quite clear on his duty to his own species.

  Louis paused. His eyes were growing tired. He was mixing bowel samples with water to create a substance that could be injected into the puppies. He wrote down the exact amounts of water and bowel he used in his notebook. He numbered the experiment and recorded the day and the time.

  ALBERT SAT IN the Café Loup with his best friend, Achmed, who was the son of an importer of bicycles from England, china from France and Holland, clocks from Switzerland, silver from Belgium, diamonds from the mines in Africa, fine diamonds that he sold to the men of Alexandria to decorate their women in a suitable manner. His importing firm was called the House of Horus, after the falcon-headed god of ancient Egypt. The firm had its offices on the large wharf in the Eastern Harbor with the old lighthouse in view from its second floor. The young men had met at the university, where Achmed had been a sportsman, a discus thrower, and Albert had been a fan. They had learned that despite the difference in religion of which Albert’s mother made much, they had everything in common. They enjoyed jumping off the dunes at the far end of the boardwalk, they enjoyed a good smoke, and they both believed that the British were joyless and the French were cowards and they liked to go to dog fights together and bet all that they had brought in their purses. They spent evenings together, allowing their brains to go soft with the liquids offered, the smoke swirling around, the moon rising and setting. They both liked large-breasted women with big hips and were happy to pay for them as often as they could.

  “I need,” said Albert, “a diamond ring for my fiancée. Can you get it for me at a special price?”

  Achmed grinned. “Of course,” he said.

  “I don’t understand,” Albert said, “why women need such expensive stones. What is it, really, just a piece of glass with a nice shine to it? I wouldn’t want it if it were free.”

  Achmed did not like to hear his business, or the one that would be his when his father finally died, mocked. “You have the sensibility of a pig,” he said.

  “I dare you to eat one,” said Albert, knowing that neither of them would cross that line, no matter how high the wager. He poked his friend in the arm.

  Achmed laughed. “Diamonds,” he said, “are the most beautiful of the earth’s fruits. Think how they sit deep in the dark earth underground, embedded in dull gray rock, until a man with a pick descends into darkness and chips away at the rock and pulls out the small treasure and brings it up to the sun, where, with the right treatment, it will let out rays that compete with the light of the sky.” He had heard his father make that speech a thousand times. “Without diamonds, no woman would marry us, and then where would we be?”

  Albert said, “Better off, I suspect. But I will marry and you know it, and so will you, and Este Malina is mine all but for the diamond. But I am short of ready funds, and you know why.”

  Albert had, just the week before, lost a considerable sum at a card game at which Achmed had been among the winners. Albert said, “I need a diamond I can afford.”

  Achmed calculated quickly. A friend at the bank was an asset, not one you marked in your books, but an asset nevertheless. Friends who owed you a favor and who were sure to rise at the bank were not to be found like lemons on a tree. A small flaw in the diamond would not be noticed or suspected by either his friend or his friend’s bride. Business, after all, was business. He clasped Albert’s arm. “I will find for you the best diamond in my safe, and we will have it set in a beautiful gold circle, and your family will be proud of you, and your betrothed’s family will be pleased at their wisdom in allowing their daughter to marry you, and in the Belgian Congo one of my representatives will open his velvet case and fill it with more diamonds for more women in Alexandria, so all is well, all is fine, don’t you think?”

  Achmed and Albert drank to their friendship, to the diamonds that traveled long distances to grace the fingers and necks and ears of women in Egypt, and to the stars that watched the boats as they sailed, and to the House of Horus that should prosper forever, and to all the objects, tables and chairs, rugs and teacups, that moved from country to country as if the material world were itself restless and in search of adventure.

  A boy with bare feet and a smud
ge of dust on his cheek, a pretty boy who was so young he seemed like a girl, appeared from around the café’s corner. He was carrying a tray with pineapple slices. They were cut fine and rested in the shape of a heart on a wooden tray. The knife used to cut the slices had been sharpened by the boy’s father, who had dipped the whetstone in water in a shallow pail, a pail that had been used to wash the boy’s sister’s sandals. The tray was heavy for the boy to carry even with both hands, and he walked slowly, calling out to those sitting at little tables at the café. “Do you want one?” said Achmed. “Let me buy you a dozen,” he laughed.

  “No, thanks,” said Albert, who did not like pineapple. The two young men waved away the pineapple seller, who then crossed the road to offer his wares to those on the other side.

  IT WAS THE hour of the day when the sun was nearly unbearable and sensible people went indoors and lay down on their beds and closed their shutters against the light. It was the time of day when women put damp cloths on their heads and allowed their servants to fan them with palm leaves bound together with strips of leather. It was a time when the bank was nearly empty and the bankers took coffee in the courtyard of the nearby hotel or walked to the beach and, taking off their shoes and socks, waded in the cool water that lapped against their ankles. It was a time when the train from Cairo pulled into the station, letting a puff of white smoke rise into the Alexandrian air.

  Este and her mother had taken off their dresses and in their slips lay on the couches of their dressing room and Este asked her mother a question. “If you had not married Papa, if you had not married at all, what would you have done?”

  Mrs. Malina looked at her daughter. She understood the question perfectly. “I would have run off to Paris and become a dancing girl,” she said.

  “You’re teasing me,” said Este.

  “Perhaps,” Mrs. Malina added, “I could have become the wife of an African chief and worn necklaces of zebra teeth.” She felt a pressure in her chest, as if there was not enough air in the room. She breathed deeply.

  “Mama,” said Este, “this is not a time for jokes.”

  Mrs. Malina turned her back to her daughter. She did not want to look at her. “I did,” she said, “what I did, and have lived the life I expected to lead, and it has been a good life. You will do the same.”

  Now it was Este’s turn to look away. Her eyes might have betrayed her thoughts, which ran backward toward her childhood.

  Saturday morning, mother and daughter set out by foot for the synagogue on rue Sultan Hussein. Este’s hat had a bird made of real feathers stuck in the brim. Mrs. Malina’s was gray, with a large ribbon of yellow tied to look like a rose. They held each other by the arm as they made their way past the chestnut vendor, the fish cart, the café on rue Rosette that had placed its tables far into the walk so it was necessary to go into the gutter to go forward. As they turned the corner of rue Nebi Daniel, a man staggered toward them, perhaps a porter at the docks. His face was pale, his hands were trembling. He reached out for Lydia. She caught his arm and steadied him. She did not understand the language he was speaking. She led him to the side of a building and helped him to sit down on a step. His hands left smudges on her blouse. Lydia patted his shoulder with her gloved hand. She wiped the perspiration from his brow with a handkerchief she drew from her pocket. She ordered Este to get him some water from a nearby café. Este hurried back with the glass. Before she could offer it to the man, she spilled some of the water on her own fingers. The water soaked through her glove. Lydia offered the man the water and then called over a small boy who appeared in a doorway. She gave him some coins to bring the man to the hospital. He said he would. He didn’t.

  Lydia and Este went on. Este took off her wet glove and threw it away. It was ruined. When they arrived at the synagogue, they went downstairs to the women’s area, where mothers could stay with children during the services. On a large table, a basin with warm water and soap waited. Este washed her hands well, and then the two women made their way up to the balcony. The service had started. When Este peered down over the railing, she could see a crowd of men covered in white prayer shawls. She could hear the chanting of the words she did not understand. She could see the ark, which was open, and the light from the far window glinting on the silver handles of the Torah. Her father was not among the men downstairs. He was meeting with city officials about the current health emergency. Albert was not there because he never came except on the High Holidays, when it would have been scandalous if he were not there at his father’s elbow.

  Este tried to catch Phoebe’s eye. She was sitting two rows behind, and the effort was noticed by all the other women along the bench, one of whom eventually whispered in Phoebe’s ear, who then looked over at her friend and smiled. They all rose and sat down again. They rose up again. They sat down again. The ark was opened. The ark was closed. The ark was opened. The Torah was walked through the congregation, and the men touched it with their shawls and kissed it with their lips. The women watched. Mrs. Malina sighed. Time passed slowly. She apologized to God for her boredom. Este let her mind wander. When she married Albert, she would at last know what other women knew. The mystery would be over. Soon she would have her own children. What would Albert talk about with her at dinner? She hated being bored. Would he be boring?

  Lydia insisted that her daughter accompany her to visit a cousin. They spent the whole afternoon discussing wedding dresses, linens from Austria, and the bleak prospects of the cousin’s sons, who were both at the university and not applying themselves to their work. They had nibbled at sweets that the cousin’s cook made in the large kitchen in the back of the building, honey and raisins baked in a crescent shape. Este had tea with mint. Lydia did not like mint, and so skipped the tea. Just as they were about to enter their carriage to return home, they saw Louis and Edmond, who had been to the French consul asking for funds to make additional purchases of chemicals. Their supplies were quickly depleted. Este waved. Lydia grabbed her daughter by the wrist. “You have no interest in these strangers,” she said. Her voice was not sweet as she said these words. Este did not receive them well. She would have interest in whomever she pleased. But this she did not say. There were no further words between them, and the silence in the carriage was not amiable.

  ROUX WENT TO the Committee of Public Safety to present the credentials of the French mission to the officials there. Also at the meeting that morning was Dr. Robert Koch. Roux shook his hand and expressed his admiration for the German’s work on anthrax. He relayed Pasteur’s respects. They were rivals, yes, but they were also colleagues. Both Roux and Koch agreed that, based on John Snow’s work in the 1857 cholera outbreak in London, it would be a good idea to keep the city water clean. “And how should we do that?” the president of the council had asked Koch, and Koch had replied, in a weak attempt at a joke, “I am a scientist, not a specialist in aqueducts. For that,” he added, “you need a Roman.”

  Roux and Koch agreed. They did not think that burning the clothes of the victims was the answer. They did not think that quarantine would work in a city like Alexandria, where the public was always in motion on bicycles or carriages or moving carts or loading and unloading packages. They didn’t think prostitutes were spreading cholera, but then, neither had any evidence that they were not. Koch invited Roux for a glass of beer after the meeting.

  Later that week Koch and his assistant, Gaffkey, had dinner with Emile Roux and Nocard and Louis Thuillier. Louis was prepared not to like the German, but in fact he found that once they started talking about their slides, their cultures, their favorite lenses, their methods of boiling water quickly, the borders that marked off the nations fell, the pride that had separated the two countries so bloodily ten years before seemed trivial. They spoke in French and English. Koch’s French was heavily accented, as was his English. Things had to be repeated several times, nevertheless the men at the table understood each other perfectly. Except that Koch was still determined to find the microbe before hi
s new friends, and the French team was certain that despite the German’s thorough and even engaging ways, the prize would be theirs. What Koch didn’t tell them was that his plan to catch the microbe differed from Pasteur’s in certain important ways. They did discover that he did not have a veterinarian working in his laboratory. “He must handle the animals himself,” said Louis.

  “That’s foolish,” said Emile. “He wastes time that way.”

  ALBERT WENT TO his father. He said, “I need five thousand francs for the ring.” Achmed had asked for thirty-five hundred, but Albert saw an opportunity and took it. “You don’t want me to show up poorly before the Malinas,” he added.

  Albert’s father sighed. He was not convinced that his son was interested enough in hard work, that he would be a success in this cutthroat world. But then the path had already been smoothed for the boy, and he was able to speak many languages and made a very good appearance at the table. “Son,” said the father, “you are a fortunate man, this girl is charming and a dear friend of your sister’s. We have known her most of her life, her character is beyond reproach. Can I say the same for you?” The father smiled to let his son know this was not a criticism, just an idle thought.

  “I will honor her,” said Albert, “as you have honored my mother.”

  This made the father rise from his seat and go to the window and pull at the curtains. “It is hard,” he said to his son, “with so many females pulling one about to stay loyal. I think it is unnatural, against a man’s nature, to wed for an entire life and pour all his capacities onto one lady’s frail bosom. Our father Abraham,” he said, “had his serving girl, and Jacob had Rachel and Leah and Bilhah and Zilpah, and you, you will not be the first to pay respect to the mother of your children while bringing presents to your friends of the night.”